Biology
by Pat Foley
Summary: Spock discovers what his mother doesn't know about Vulcan biology. Chapter 3 up, and complete Holo series 0
1. Chapter 1

Biology

By

Pat Foley

At twelve, Spock hadn't yet started the preadolescent growth spurt that the healers and geneticist had predicted would cause him to sprout up taller than his father. He was still on the small side for a Vulcan boy his age, and lean as a whippet. No one would guess by looking at him that he found emotional control harder than his peers, for in addition to his unprepossessing physical stature, he was also carefully restrained in physical expression and body language, by main force of will. He even kept his very knowing bright black eyes partially camouflaged by shining black bangs. But other than these minor deviations, he was indistinguishable in a pack from other Vulcan boys his age, nothing obvious to indicate he was the son of the legendary Sarek of Vulcan, heir to a long line of Vulcan warriors and statesmen. Far less obvious was that he was also the child of Sarek's human wife Amanda, or the pride of both his parents, and the love of his human mother's life – after her husband. To the casual eye, he was merely another Vulcan boy, as alike as seeds in a plomeek.

He was, however, fiercely intelligent, more so even than his parents realized. Perhaps the teachers at his prestigious school, the most exclusive on Vulcan, whose uniform he so casually wore, had a better understanding of that. And behind his thick bangs, his bright black eyes had all the sharp observance of the budding scientist he was to become. Because he was so often quiet and unobtrusive, even his parents too often underestimated how much he observed and understood.

Entering the kitchen, he paused by the windowed wall to search for any changes in the many plants his mother kept there. He was interested to see that even though several flowers had faded and been pinched off of a violet primrose, a mass of new budheads were now pushing up through the loamy soil in which they were rooted. And a mossy basket of crocuses had sprouted spiky leaves. Perhaps by tomorrow the flowers would be out. Though he'd been predestined since before his birth to follow his father's footsteps to eventual clan rule and Federation politics, Spock's educational interests were being firmly directed into the hard sciences that were traditional in his family line – astrophysics, computers, mathematics. But Spock found biology interesting. Even more so the oddity of Terran things growing and thriving on Vulcan. His mother's plants. His mother. And by default, himself of course, half Terran, even though it was barely acknowledged by most.

"My goodness, is it that late already?" his mother asked as he dropped his carrybag by the kitchen door. She was sitting at the table, a compad before her, no doubt working on one of her academic papers. Spock never understood her odd choices for working environments, because she had an office. Two offices, in fact. Though she was human, his mother taught at the Vulcan Science Academy and had an office there, as well as one in his parent's suite.

"Aren't you back rather early? I thought you were visiting your grandmother today?" she asked absently, her eyes still on her work.

"That's tomorrow, mother," Spock said. Had he been a Terran pre-teenager, he would have rolled his eyes. As it was, his voice mirrored the exact tone of excessive patience his father used when his mother was being 'human'. He wondered how Terrans could accomplish anything when they were forever unaware of such basic essentials as the hour of the day and the day of the week.

"Hmmm. Just a minute, honey," Amanda frowned at her compad, chewing the tail of her long braid, something for which Spock knew, were his father here, he would certainly mention to her. Then her brow cleared, and she tossed the braid over her shoulder and entering a last notation, breathed a sigh of relief. "That's done. It may not dazzle the Legion of Science, but," she tapped off the compad decisively, "it's good enough for government work." She turned toward him.

Spock raised a brow. "Shouldn't all work be done with equal competence? Or if there is any discrepancy, that for the government done excellently?"

"That depends on the government," his mother said, that dry note in her voice that he knew meant she was teasing.

"Which government was this for?" he asked curiously.

"Never mind. And forget we had this conversation. Your father would say I was corrupting you with my decadent human values."

"I can't forget it, Mother. I have eidetic-"

"Yes, I know. You're your father's son in that respect. And right now you're being a royal pest in your mother's. Shoo."

"**Father** is Vulcan royalty, if one ascribes Terran titles to Vulcan roles, but I wasn't aware that **you**, Mother, were anything but--"

"Anything but!" Amanda interrupted him. "Indeed. You had better stop right there."

"I was merely trying to establish a point of fact as to your heritage."

"In point of fact, as you say, there isn't much royalty left on Terra these days. The Eugenics wars destroyed the last remnants of the old houses. And what there is, Vulcan wouldn't recognize as such. Terrans have no houses tracing their linage back thousands of years."

"How can one forget one's ancestors?" Spock asked, truly puzzled.

"They had other concerns. Wars, famines… Think of Vulcan, before it had been at peace for 5000 years."

"Even then we honored our ancestors." Spock flicked a brow. "It's very careless of humanity."

"Perhaps so," Amanda said, amused. "But it's not polite to say it."

"Facts –

"Facts aside, people don't like to have their noses rubbed in disagreeable ones. Vulcans can be a bit sententious in that regard. And without much justification. Before that five thousand years, you know, Vulcans were every bit as warlike, if not more so, than Terrans."

"More so." Vulcans are better at everything than Terrans," Spock said, with the smugness of both his race and his age . "At war, and at peace."

"Good for you. Have you jousted with humility today, my son?"

Spock eyed her suspiciously, well aware that it was probably both a quote and a trap. "I have schoolwork," he said loftily, declining the challenge.

"Very strategic of you," Amanda said, amused. "And I have dinner to prepare. But before you start your homework, take your excellent royal self out to the garden and get me some carrots, a few peppers, and a couple of lemons." She pointed to a basket by the kitchen door.

"I'd rather eat Vulcan food."

"I haven't got time to cook Vulcan today; it takes too long to rehydrate everything. You'll eat what you get, and like it. Anyway, your father never complains about what I give him."

"He doesn't have to pick it."

"Since when do you object to picking food?"

"It's cold out there in the Terran gardens. And wet. The mist injectors will be on now."

"Well, turn them off, silly."

"The Head Gardener doesn't like it. The last time I did it, he told me I disrupted his growth charting and ruined a whole quarter's statistics."

"Hang his statistics. Just tell Sjaron that it's my garden, and I told you to."

"I'll still get wet. All those green leaves drip."

"Trust me, you won't melt. Why, on Earth it rains all the time. Your father's been rained on, sleeted and even snowed on. He's still large as life and twice as natural."

"That doesn't make – " Spock backed off, recognizing another quote. "Anyway, this is Vulcan."

"You can pick some rosebuds for a snack afterwards."

"How many is some and what is a few?" Spock said, still hanging back reluctantly.

"As many as we're likely to eat. Go on, get moving."

"Mother, that's not precise enough," Spock protested.

"Scoot!" she said, propelling him by the simple measure of a hand flat on a certain portion of his anatomy. Giving her a dark look and his bottom a surreptitious rub, Spock snatched up a basket and went.

_To be continued..._


	2. Chapter 2

Biology

By

Pat Foley

Chapter 2

When Spock came back from the garden staggering under a laden basket, his hair and clothes damp from having indeed gotten caught in a mist cycle, his mother was employed in her usual pre-dinner preparations. To him, these always seemed to involve an inordinate amount of labor for the task involved, a scandalous use of water by Vulcan standards, and a lot of noise. When she wasn't exclaiming over nicked fingers, or berating the sacrificial produce for not being more Terran-like, she was singing arcane Terran songs, occasionally in unknown languages, writing parts of academic papers, correcting student work, or listening to newsnet broadcasts, all in-between kitchen chores. Sometimes all these activities at once. With such very unVulcan distractions going on, it could be difficult for Spock to concentrate on his studies. Particularly since his mother had a very pleasant singing voice. And when she wasn't singing, she often made very interesting comments – though not necessarily to him.

For example, at present, she had the communications console in the kitchen tuned to a major Federation newsnet provider – slightly too loud for Vulcan ears, though perhaps necessary for her over the splashing and chopping noises she was making -- and was punctuating the newsnet commentators remarks with pungent ones of her own.

"_Today, the Federation Undersecretary March signed the charter for twelve more Terran colonies in the Pan-Andes system, over strong opposition from Federation Andorian Ambassador Thonset," _the newscaster reported.

"And there goes old Manifest Destiny March marching out again," Amanda muttered half under her breath, but clearly audible to her son's ears. She split open a spaghetti squash with a resounding thwack.

" _who claims Andoria holds title to that system. With two colonies already in situ, Andoria complained of rampant Terran expansionism in colonization requests. March defended that the Terran applicants--"_

"No doubt saw the Holy Grail out there in the system, and were irresistibly drawn to it." Amanda disemboweled the squash of its seeds and set them aside for replanting. "Swallows to Capistrano."

"_Had demonstrated a greater need, and a more encompassing system plan for the quadrant."_

"Or perhaps a very large **credit** sign, in lieu of a Grail." Amanda said ironically. She slammed the oven door on the forlorn squash.

"_Thonset charged he would submit a formal protest to the Federation to be called into general question over the Terran majority in the board which approves the Federation space charter system, and prejudice and favoritism in the application process. March protested that Andoria is trying to derail normal Federation procedures for its own special interests."_

"Of course it never hurts to set up a human system, with human judges, and then wonder why all the **other** species complain of a lack of level playing field." She put the seeds in the drying rack for eventual replanting.

"_Representatives of the Federation High Council, when asked if there would be a general session on the Andorian question, had no comment."_

"Naturally. The collective Federation would fall down in shock if they did. Heaven forbid that the High Council dirty their hands in actual politics. Us do anything about it? Us rabbits?" She scrubbed the counter clear of squash guts. "Not that Andoria didn't set up those squatter colonies in advance of the Federation decision, just to have the excuse to raise this very question," Amanda snorted, and tossed the detritus into the recycler.

"What's a Grail?" Spock asked curiously, interrupting this interesting if singular discourse.

"What?" Amanda turned toward him. "When did you come back in?"

"When Manifest Destiny March was marching out again. Does he really march? He seemed to walk quite normally when he was here last month at your dinner party for the Vulcan Alliance conference."

"It's just an expression," Amanda said. "But don't mention that name to him if he comes back here."

"What if I meet him somewhere else?" Spock asked slyly.

"You little devil! Don't you dare!"

"I'm not a devil." Spock flicked a brow. "Though I do have pointed ears. Consquently--"

"You'll have a sore bottom if you use them to listen to things you're not supposed to."

"I hear a lot. I just don't understand everything you say. It's very unfair. I always understand Father."

"Well, you're one up on me then," Amanda said, amused. "I don't think I ever will."

"It's because you're Human," Spock said. Amanda raised her brows in astonishment at this callous dismissal, but Spock was continuing, "I know what a credit is. It's what Vulcan pays its Federation taxes in. Is a Grail some sort of currency?" He detoured from his original question to a recently discovered point of interest. "Did you know people pay **five** Federation credits just to see our gardens?"

"Yes. And cheap at the price, considering the havoc they raise."

"They steal things too," Spock confided. "There's one lady, who comes twice a month, with a big pocket in her tunic, and she hides ever so much fruit in it. I've seen it."

"You what? How?" Amanda asked, more shocked at that than the theft. "You aren't allowed, you aren't even supposed to be in the gardens when tourists come through. You know that. And you'd have to play hooky from school to see them anyway."

"I didn't see her in **person**," Spock defended. "I saw the security surveillance tapes. The Guard came in to show them to Father just before my lyre lesson."

"Why would the Guard bother your father with something as trivial as that?"

"Because she works at the Terran embassy. They were concerned that confronting her or refusing her admittance would cause a diplomatic incident. But she **should** be deported off -planet, you know," Spock said, with the self righteous relish of youth. "She's a real **thief**."

"A true desperado, hmmm?" Amanda supposed that on Vulcan, even a petty thief was so rare a character that it had the glamour of novelty. "I just hope she got her five credits worth," Amanda said dubiously. "What did your father say?"

Spock made a minute face of disappointment. "He sent me out of the room. I **always** get sent out of the room when anything fascinating is happening. But she should be deported," he decreed. "That's the punishment when outworlders break Vulcan law. And if **I** went to the Terran Embassy and stole things, I --"

"**I'd** spank you so that you couldn't sit down for a month."

"I didn't say that I would. I said **if** I did," Spock was offended. "And if I did, I'd be subject to Terran laws, because it is Terran ground, even if on Vulcan."

"Don't even think about it. You, my son, have no excuse for stealing. Ever."

"I wasn't thinking about it, I was just pointing out that she broke **our** laws on **our** grounds and therefore--"

"Never mind. If you father sent you out of the room, you shouldn't be discussing it with me."

"Don't you want to know who it was?"

"Certainly not. That's the last thing I would countenance. I have to deal with those people, you know. If your father wants to tell me, he will. But he won't."

Spock abandoned this now unpropitious subject in view of this deplorable lack of curiosity about a fellow human being. "I still want to know what a Grail is."

"Oh, that." Amanda looked exasperated. "It's a Terran religious symbol too often used to justify a lot of war and conquest."

"How did it get in the Pan Andes system?"

"By metaphor," she said ironically.

Forgetting himself, Spock wrinkled his brow in puzzlement. "That doesn't make--"

"Anyway, it's not your concern either." Amanda approached the table, looking at his basket. "So you survived your expedition? Let's see what you got. Why did you bring back all these lemons, when I only asked for a couple?"

"You said to bring back what we would use," Spock said primly. "And I want some hot lemonade."

"'I want' is not a very gentlemanly expression," Amanda countered. 'May I please have some'," she corrected, "is more to the point."

"May I please," Spock rephrased with a trace of impatience. "Isn't it inefficient for me to request something you know you will grant?"

"You don't **know** I'm going to grant it." Amanda pointed out, tumbling the produce out on the table and taking the vegetables she wanted.

"Untrue." Spock struggled to corral the lemons set into motion by her actions, forced to throw his arms wide to encompass them. "Based on past statistical behavior, you will. In the past 114 times I've requested it, you have. In fact, you have never **not** granted it. Therefore--"

"Don't throw your statistics at me. It doesn't impress me in the slightest. And if you want to make it 115, as well as keep that perfect record, you'll say please."

"But logic dictates--" Spock missed a lemon, which dropped to the floor. Reaching to grab it, a half dozen more fell, rolling in all directions.

"Logic can dictate all it wants. There's a more suitable Terran expression your mother dictates which goes along the lines of, "don't push your luck'. And **wash** the lemons, please, before squeezing them," she said, stepping around them.

"You didn't say that I could have it."

"Yes, you may. But wash them first."

"They were already wet in the garden," Spock grumbled, now on his hands and knees going after them. "Why should they need to be washed?"

"Half of them are on the floor."

"That's not **my** fault." Spock rose up indignantly to put some on the table and nearly bumped his head. "Anyway, the floor is sanitized regularly."

"**Wash** them."

"I can just sonic them. Washing them is an illogical waste of water. And Vulcans never waste wa--"

"Just **do** it."

"But I'm not going to eat the **skins**," Spock pointed out, chasing around the lemons that had escaped into odd corners. "Therefore it's even more illogical--"

"Just **do** it – you're not going to melt."

"But I'm already wet." Spock shivered, a bit theatrically, to make his point, his arms full of lemons, juggling them to keep them from falling again. "And water is cold."

"Then use **warm** water."

"It's an illogical waste of energy."

"Look, I've said it four times--"

"Five," Spock rolled his eyes, just a trifle, at his evidence of his father's often stated opinion that his mother could barely count. And although she just as often took umbrage at it, it was clearly true and here was the evidence of it.

"Very well, five," Amanda said, undrawn. "When three, as you well know, Mr. Statistic – and don't think I didn't see you roll your eyes -- is my limit. Don't play those games with me. My kitchen is not a negotiating table. Is it logical to drive your mother crazy?"

"My not washing lemons would cause you an emotional imbalance?"

"Honey, **please**. Practice your inherited debating skills on somebody else. I'm trying to listen to the news." Amanda threw him a towel, turning back to her own work. It landed on his head, since he wasn't going to let go of his armful to catch it. She missed that, as she was setting back the feed on the newscast to replay what else she had missed. "Dry yourself off, wash the lemons in **hot** water," she said, over her shoulder at him. "And not another word for the next fifteen minutes."

Spock lowered his burden carefully into the basket, removing the towel from his head, his dignity severely injured, and toweled his hair dry. Then he washed and juiced the lemons he'd chosen, and finally settled down at the kitchen table with his hot lemonade watching his mother curiously as she prepared dinner and simultaneously listened to the end of a news report, noting her expression went grave as the newscast went on. While he did have schoolwork, a private research project of his own caused him to delay it, surveying his mother with a judicial gaze when she switched to another Federation newsfeed and listened to the same story, her head tilted in a manner Spock knew meant she was thinking seriously, comparing the two. After listening to the same story on yet a third newsfeed she took a pad out of a drawer and made some notes on it, nibbling her lower lip as she did so. Then, shaking her head as if shaking off thoughts, she switched to the local planetary newsfeed with an air of relief.

Not a second after the requisite fifteen minutes were up, Spock interrupted this local newscaster, who was giving nothing more than a tedious report of the current weather forecast with his own question. "Why were you listening to the same news story on three different newsfeeds?"

Amanda gave him a sharp look. "Aren't you the observant one?"

"Was it something for your work?" Spock persisted, in spite of his own, near heretical suppositions that he'd lately been forming.

"Perhaps I was just curious about it," Amanda said non-committally.

Spock gave her a suspicious look. When his mother said _perhaps_ in that diffident way, he'd come to recognize it as code. Either she was offering an alternative interpretation to her behavior, or simply not telling him the whole truth. On the other hand, he wasn't really entitled to quiz her about her activities, so he had to be content with what truths, however limited, she told him. These limitations on his research could be frustrating. When he'd been younger, he had been content with the face value of things. His father was an ambassador. His mother was a teacher. But now that he was older, and trying to make sense of his often very contradictory world, some things didn't quite fit.

He would have welcomed some straight answers to some of the puzzling questions of his life, but his parents were not always forthcoming. At the top of his list, of course, was the question of why his parents had married. Now that he was old enough to have been taught some facts about Vulcan biology, he'd have liked to know why his mother seemed so unaffected, unawed, by something so alien to her, and so upsetting to Vulcans that they did not discuss it at all, outside of the little training he'd had in it. Surely if Vulcans were undone by their own biology, humans must be desolated. But his mother was clearly not, and as clearly, to his discerning eyes, she loved his father anyway. How she could was a question too dangerous for Spock to think, let alone ask. So he concentrated on lesser ones.

The fact that his mother always traveled with his father on his ambassadorial trips, for example. When the Thendaran Ambassador to the Federation as well as to Vulcan traveled to those same Federation conferences, his wife often stayed on Vulcan with her children. But his mother had never stayed home with him – not that he could remember. Sometimes he'd traveled with them, when he was very young, but once he was old enough to go to school, away to boarding school he went. Of course, now that he was preadolescent , he understood why bondmates didn't care to be separated for any lengthy distance. But even on short trips, where that shouldn't be an issue, his mother always went. He found it odd that no matter how his mother had to juggle and rearrange her teaching schedule to fit his father's diplomatic one, sometimes complaining bitterly about having to do so, she never raised the question of why she should.

And then there were the conversations his parents had, usually cryptic and over his head, about Federation events. And the reporters, including one of those whose commentary she had just listened to, who always clustered around his mother and asked her political questions, even though she held no diplomatic position or official post. Even Manifest Destiny March had hung around her, at the social event he'd attended, flattering her and courting her good opinion so assiduously his father had stepped between them and very pointedly took his Mother's hand. Though a clear breach of Vulcan propriety, even Spock understood it as as a signal from one Vulcan male to a rival that he had been too attentive.

When, as a very young child, he'd asked his parents why the press clustered around his mother nearly as much as his father, though he was the Ambassador and she held no post, his mother had just smiled at his father and answered, "Because I speak their language." When Spock pointed out that his father spoke English equally fluently, Sarek had made some excuse to send him from the room. And that was code too, his father's code for 'don't ask that question again'. It wasn't long after that that he'd stopped going away with them to conferences. Of course, he had grown old enough to go away to school then. Spock couldn't fault his father for putting a Vulcan priority on education. But still, he'd remembered the incident. Spock had lately been trying to decide if his mother had more to do with his father's work than merely giving dinner parties and talking to the press on an unofficial basis. He wasn't sure what he thought of that possibility. And his parents didn't seem too interested in explaining things to him.

He only knew that as he grew, he had become less convinced that he could make himself fully Vulcan merely by following his father's precepts and saying he was so. So his mother's place in his father's world was of more interest to him. Spock was of an age when he was able to not only see puzzles, but search for answers. And his dual nature was the most pressing question of his existence.

Unfortunately the questions often could never be asked. And the answers were quite as elusive. He turned his attention back to his mother.

"Anyway, it's not your concern," Amanda continued. "But if your schoolwork isn't pressing, you can help with dinner. You might as well help anyway, because we'll be eating soon and it's too late to get embroiled in homework now."

"What do you want me to do?" Spock asked, a bit reluctantly. He wasn't terribly fond of kitchen chores.

"You can make the salad, while I make the sauce for the spaghetti. She gave him back the washed lettuce and vegetables and a bowl. Spock resigned himself to work and sniffed appreciatively as she took down the spices she was going to use in the sauce. He began to tear the lettuces into smaller pieces.

Soon the kitchen was full of good smells. The sauce was bubbling, the spaghetti squash was nearly baked and Spock had almost completed chopping the vegetables for a salad, even though he was using his mother's preferred method, a knife, rather than the faster food processors. His stomach was growling pleasurably in anticipation of dinner when he saw the flash of orange that was his father's flyer through the windows that looked on the hanger court, preceded by his father soon walking through the door.

Not yet eighty, his father was in the prime of young Vulcan adulthood, with a look of eagles in his eyes and a sheer strength of manner that lesser beings, Spock included, could find daunting. His mother, oddly enough, didn't seem to find him so. Perhaps, at least in that respect they were well matched, however untraditional their alliance was otherwise.

Spock didn't look up as his parents greeted each other. He found his mother's affection embarrassing even directed toward himself, much less his father. And his father's toward his mother he just found confusing, given his father's Vulcan nature. He concentrated on his chopping while his parents quietly traded sentences about their respective days, Sarek meanwhile turning down the audio of the Vulcan newsnet broadcast to something more in keeping with Vulcan hearing. As he did so, he asked Amanda, rather pointedly, "Did you…?"

"I did. My notes are on the pad there."

Spock raised his head abruptly at that, his suspicious confirmed, watching curiously while his father picked up the pad. So she hadn't been listening for her own work. The action caught his father's attention and their eyes met. Sarek raised a brow and putting down the pad, greeted him, adding, "What **are** you doing there?"

Spock felt that was somewhat obvious a question for his father to ask, but he answered anyway. "Making a salad."

"So I can see. Wouldn't your time be more appropriately spent studying?"

Spock glanced from his father to his mother. When he was younger, such reproofs sometimes made him feel a trace of shame. Now, that he had better control of his emotions, and a broader view of things, he only allowed himself, at best, a touch of exasperation. Wasn't he his mother's child, as well as his father's? And if she made a request of him, or required him to do something, however human or illogical or even inappropriate, didn't he have as much of an obligation to obey her as his father, provided it was no serious transgression from his Vulcan training? His father certainly would not be pleased with him if he did disobey her. Nor, needless to say, would his mother at being disobeyed. Being placed in such a no-gain situation didn't please Spock. He'd just become prescient enough to wonder why his father, such a renowned diplomat abroad, seemed to frequently place his family in situations where no one could be pleased.

That Sarek, in making such comments, apparently didn't always trust his human wife to raise his Vulcan son was one thing, and between them. But when Sarek seemed to expect him to, in effect, raise himself above her authority, to reject his mother's guidance, in however trivial a matter, and hold himself only to some imagined ideal of Vulcanness, in effect to raise himself without a mother, Spock felt that was unfair. Though he wasn't mature enough to be able to articulate such feelings, certainly not to Sarek, still he felt that Sarek was asking too much of him as a child. Spock no longer felt torn to pieces by such reproofs, as he occasionally had when he was younger. But he still found them uncomfortable. He was spared a reply, however, because his mother answered for him, as he knew she would if he gave her half a chance.

"He's just helping me for a few minutes, Sarek. His education isn't going to collapse from that."

Spock spared a glance from under his lashes to see how his father took that reply, but instead of being displeased, Sarek seemed merely mildly amused. Spock had long noticed his father was usually indulgent to her mother's humanity, if not to his son's. And it was clear, since he had picked up the pad again, his attention was more on it than his son's minor transgressions. "It's one thing for you to unnecessarily delegate yourself as a kitchen maid in lieu, of or in addition to your other myriad duties, my wife. I accept that, even though it does seem a waste of your valuable time. But I see no need for our son to sacrifice his education to be so employed."

"A sacrifice of his education. Oh, my. What a terrible prospect." Amanda paused. "How many levels are you ahead of your average age group in school?" Amanda asked Spock, rhetorically, for he knew she knew the answer as well as himself.

"Three," Spock said. Not without the barest trace of well deserved smugness. He worked hard enough that he felt justified in it.

"There," Amanda shook her head in mock disgust. "I can see how his education is suffering. Spock, didn't you know your father expected you to graduate the VSA tomorrow?"

"Not at all, " Sarek said easily, still reading through the notes on the pad. "Merely to do his assigned schoolwork this evening," he continued, unphased by her teasing.

"It won't do him any harm to spend a few minutes with his nose outside of a text. Anyway," Amanda glanced at her son, to let him know she was teasing him now, "hard work builds character."

"I have character," Spock dared to inject. He rarely interfered in these mock "arguments" between his parents, but her glance, to him, seemed to imply an invitation to play. And Sarek appeared to be in an indulgent enough mood, and clearly distracted by whatever he was reading, that Spock decided to see how far it could be taken.

"You **are** a character," Amanda said fondly. "Keep chopping. I need that stuff, or we'll never eat."

Finishing Amanda's notes, Sarek glanced up to gaze disapprovingly at his son's efforts as he noisily resumed his chopping. "I don't understand this predilection for rudimentary kitchen utensils over the food processors." He took the knife out of his son's hands and pointed him to the device.

Amanda let out a breath of exasperation. "Since when are you the expert on food preparation? I've never known you even to boil water. In more than a dozen years of marriage."

"Precisely why I have a wife," Sarek said dryly.

"Don't you listen to him, Spock," Amanda said, unwittingly brandishing the bread knife at her husband in punctuation to her statement. "This is one area in which I am determined you are **not** to follow in your father's footsteps."

"I am bonded as well," Spock said, with a child's instinct for playing one parent off another, watching in private amusement as his father raised a brow, both at her statement, and her inadvertent action. There were times when even Spock considered his mother somewhat of a barbarian.

Amanda huffed. "Take that attitude with T'Pring, Spock, and just see how she responds."

"Spock, I am sure you have done enough for the present," Sarek said, effectively taking control of the situation and effecting, as well, to carefully disarm his wife. "You are dismissed."

It was his father's warning that he'd crossed one of those forbidden lines. Or that his parents had crossed one of theirs, revealing too much of themselves to him. Part of him was disappointed; the other was examining curiously what and where all these forbidden lines were in their relationships. He sometimes felt that however wrong, or even dangerous, it might be to push, at times it was the most empirical way to discover the answers that he couldn't divine any other way.

"Oh," Amanda shook her head in exasperation and capitulated. "But it's too late for Spock to start his homework now. We'll be eating in a few minutes. Why don't you ….go out and fill the garden feeders," she told her son. "And then wash up for dinner."

"Yes, mother," Spock said, bringing the salad bowl over to his mother. He added, in a precocious parting shot to his father, as he walked out the door, "I know something is to be discussed, because I'm being sent away."

"He knows too much; we must get rid of him," Amanda said in German, as he walked out the door. It was the language his parents had switched to when they had realized he was understanding them in French. Spock had, however, innocently come across a German grammar and dictionary in his entirely casual perusals of his mother's Terran library, searching for something else of course. Thanks to eidetic memory, with one reading he had made himself near perfect in the language. But this time he'd gotten good enough at the emotional control of his expression that his parents had yet to divine his comprehension. Though he made sure to keep his head down when listening in his father's presence, so the minute expressions he could not control would not betray him. Words aside, even in a language foreign to him, the lilt in his mother's amused voice, and something in her tone told Spock that she was not only teasing, but her words were something in the nature of one of her interminable quotes. Nevertheless, on stark meaning alone, they struck a little chord in his heart and caused his feet to pause in the passage. More so when his father replied, in a voice utterly serious, and made more ominous by the odd language. "He ought to go away to school."

Without conscious thought, he lingered in the garden hall, to hear his mother's answer.

"Absolutely not." His mother forgot herself enough that she said that in English. And in a manner that if English had an emphatic mode, this would be it. "We already had that fight. Let's not resurrect it."

"That was four years ago." Sarek had automatically followed her into English, so Spock didn't even have to struggle to translate the unfamiliar German. He stood stock still, head raised high to catch their slightly lowered voices, filtering out the Vulcan newscaster who still nattered on.

"Four years or four days, it doesn't matter to me."

"He is getting older. And as you have pointed out, more aware."

"What are you afraid of? It seems to me he's mastering your disciplines very well."

"That's debatable."

"Sarek. You know that his reports from his instructors are excellent. I see them too, you know."

"Yes, they always are," his father said. "But I no longer necessarily trust them."

"Aren't they the teachers you chose?" Amanda asked, sounding frustrated. "The best, the most prestigious schools, experts in the fields of all his advanced subjects. And in the Vulcan disciplines too. I don't understand you. First you were concerned he wouldn't master these disciplines. And then, when he does, both academic and in Vulcan controls, you **still** aren't satisfied."

"In essential nature, no, I'm not."

"Sarek, **your** essential nature isn't all that pristinely Vulcan. Take it from your wife, the woman who sleeps--"

"Amanda!" Sarek cut her off, and switched back to German. "He'll be coming back soon."

Spock came back to himself and realizing what he was doing, he hastened out the garden hall, letting himself quietly out the courtyard door. He ran to fill the bird feeders, and came as quickly back. He didn't seem to have missed much of the argument, though this time, he felt a bit ashamed for this more deliberate eavesdropping as he came back in and stood hesitant in the hallway.

"I just sometimes wonder **whose** nature you're trying to protect him from," Amanda was saying tartly, slamming a cabinet door. Spock could hear the thumps of china as she set the table. "Mine or yours. I'm beginning to think it's the latter."

"That is quite enough, my wife," Sarek said, and the tone in his voice was one which, when Spock was on the receiving end, made him inwardly shiver. It didn't seem to daunt his mother, however, who came back equally chilly.

"I quite agree. No, no and **no**, Sarek. Don't ask me again. He already goes away to school every time we have to travel. And remember what happened before, when that off-world epidemic ran rampant through his boarding school. If it wasn't for T'Pau, he might have died."

"That was an exceptional situation. The virulent agent was a rare mutation, but it was quickly isolated and an antiviral vaccine prepared. It is not likely to happen again."

"I'm not going to risk it happening again when we can help it. I endure enough separations from my only child in the name of your duty. I do agree with you that taking him with us, in some of the situations we encounter, is even more risky than boarding school, and I put up with those separations for that reason, and that alone. But I won't endure any more, neither of separations nor of risk. When we are on planet, he stays here with us. Don't even bring the subject up. It's closed. _Verboten_. He **stays**."

Spock took that as his cue to come forward both because his father had no doubt calculated the time and was expecting to hear him and because, in secret alliance with his mother, he didn't want to give his father the opportunity to reply. He let the garden court door close unnecessarily loudly, and for good measure, made a little too much noise on the passage.

"He is coming," Amanda said, _sotto_ _voice_. "Even I can hear him. And good thing too. Half the time he walks like Natty Bumppo, but the rest--"

"Indeed," Sarek said, giving him a sharp look when he entered the room, making Spock wonder if he had perhaps been somewhat too obvious. It was never wise to underestimate his father.

"I filled the feeders," Spock announced unnecessarily, striving for a diversion, meanwhile making a mental note to check the library computer and find out who this Natty Bumppo was.

"Thank you, honey," Amanda said, distracted enough to be humanly polite even though common Vulcan discourse required no such statements and her use of endearments was something that Vulcan dignity would object to.

"Thanks are illogical," Spock informed her loftily, in his best imitation of his father's Vulcan manner. "And I am not the byproduct of an insect's metabolism."

Amanda bit her lip on a smile. "_Et tu, Brute_," she murmured, presumably for his father's ears alone, though Spock, of course, could hear her clearly.

"There's no need to be impolite, Spock," Sarek said, ignoring his mother's irreverent comment, his sharp eyes still dissecting his son.

This was exactly the sort of thing that frustrated Spock, and made him feel like he couldn't win.

Seeing his father's too discerning eyes on him, Spock ducked his head as he went to wash his hands, though he doubted that Sarek missed the flash of rebellious emotion in his own. In the brief silence that ensured, the Vulcan newscaster rattled on unexpectedly loudly in the momentary quiet, giving the latest actuarial news, ending with the phrase, "including three deaths, two male, one female, from an unspecified fever."

"There, you see," Amanda said, looking up from her work, still upset enough to take up again this aspect of their conversation, even with Spock present. "you **say** there's no danger. But there's always that footnote in the news. And always associated with deaths. I don't understand why, with all Vulcan's diagnostic abilities, they can't figure out what that unspecified fever is and **do** something about it."

Spock stared at his mother, jaw dropping for once in unVulcan surprise. "But mother," he said, before he collected himself.

Sarek turned to him abruptly. "**Spock**!" he said, more sharply than he usually spoke.

Spock drew himself up and stared at his father, realizing abruptly what this meant. He got hold of his first astonishment. And now had no intention of raising or ever speaking more on the subject to his clueless mother. But he couldn't prevent himself from meeting his father's repressive gaze with his own amazement. They shared a wordless look, even while Spock's astonishment faded under his control, while Amanda, puzzled, looked from one to the other of them.

"What?" she said impatiently.

"I…I..have schoolwork," Spock stuttered.

"Yes. It is **well** past time you attended your studies," Sarek said, staring him down repressively.

"We'll be eating dinner in five minutes," Amanda said.

"I have to go…and wash up." Spock said, and used that excuse to this time exit the room post haste.

"That's the first time that child has willingly suggested contact with soap and water," Amanda said behind him. "And what were **you** so sharp about?"

"We'll discuss it later," Sarek said. And then he left the room too.

Spock climbed the stairs to his personal suite, hoping to escape long enough to master his composure and understand the scope of what he had just discovered, so that he could face his parents again with some semblance of control. But before he even had that necessary respite, he heard his father's voice lasso him.

"Spock."

Spock swallowed hard and straightened his shoulders. He slowly turned around. "Yes, sir?"

"Come with me."

Spock tightened his already straight shoulders and let out the breath he'd drawn in as noiselessly as possible. He had, obviously, gotten himself in trouble again. He followed Sarek into his study and stood before his desk. But for once, Sarek seemed at a loss for words. Spock watched him narrowly as Sarek looked out the long windows of his study that faced the formal gardens. Spock used a long established method of counting seconds till Sarek spoke. Usually the longer his father took to begin, the more upset he was with him, though Sarek no doubt would refute ever having his mental state so characterized. Spock didn't know how else to think of it, since clearly at times his father wasn't pleased with him. He stood face forward, waiting. This time, it took 46 long seconds – and based on personal experience, however illogical, seconds spent standing before Sarek **were** longer than others – before his father spoke again.

"When you reached the age of twelve, you were deemed mature enough by your instructors," a tone in Sarek's voice implied to Spock that his own father had not necessarily found him so, "to be introduced to the basic facts of Vulcan biology. Inherent in that training was the understanding that, once given, it was not to be discussed. Not with your fellow students. Not with younger children. And certainly not with…outworlders."

Spock's initial resolve that he would show no reaction to anything his father said went abruptly by the wayside. He couldn't stop his eyes from widening and his gaze from going immediately to his father's face, and a slight gasp to escape his lungs. Never would he have thought he'd hear his father call his own mother, Sarek's own bondmate, the mother of his child, the woman they'd both lived with for a dozen years an _outworlder_. Not just the word, contemptuous in its general use, but the implications of that which had first occurred to Spock in the kitchen, and that he had yet to contemplate well enough to come to grips with, stunned him so completely his eyes unfocused as he struggled to process what this all implied.

"Do you understand?" Sarek asked insistently, when he failed to respond. "These things are not to be spoken of."

"I wasn't," Spock protested.

"You were about to, had I not stopped you," Sarek accused.

Spock swallowed hard again. "No, I wouldn't have. It was, that -- just for a moment -- I was…startled," he admitted. Even though he felt, however outlawed feeling was, that he'd had every right to be startled. He knew the basic facts of life. He had not, to use one of his mother's euphemisms, appeared one day in their cabbage patch. Or even in a plomeek patch. He was not so blind that he couldn't see the intimacy between his parents, nor the incipient signs of pon far before that state overtook his father and Spock himself was banished to stay with T'Pau. "I was surprised that she-- That she didn't know --" He met his father's eyes uneasily, a question he couldn't help forming in them, one Sarek ruthlessly repressed.

"It is not your place to consider the matter at all. Let alone have any **emotional** response to it."

Sarek was absolutely right. Spock couldn't agree more that this subject was one that should only be discussed between his parents and that he had no place in it. But the way his father said 'emotional' made it clear Sarek considered that the worst of crimes. Yet it seemed to Spock, if he allowed himself to consider it, that his father was behaving the most emotionally of all. While Vulcans never discussed Pon Far, there were inevitable casualties of that state, both natural and from challenges and the consequences of the rare and unmentioned Vulcan divorce. They were always listed in actuarial reports, or in newscasts or obituaries as being the result of an 'unspecified fever'. Every adult Vulcan understood why the specific fever in question was left unspecified – because it was not to be spoken of. It was the practical way to report the deaths – the visible loss of individuals from society -- from an situation that in itself could not be candidly discussed. That his mother was ignorant of this common euphemism, particularly considering her position as a wife, implied that his father, at least, had been very remiss in acquainting her with some basic facts of Vulcan life, facts her own preadolescent son had possession of.

Yet that heretical thought Spock could not allow himself to consider. At least, not at twelve, faced with this subject. It was easier to banish the subject from his thoughts and he did so with ruthless Vulcan control. "Yes, sir," Spock said. "No, sir." Now that he understood the situation, his surprise aside, there was nothing more to be said. And he'd long discovered that when in doubt, or in trouble, it was always safe just to agree with his father and hope, as his mother might characterize, to get the hell out.

Sarek, just barely, shook his head in almost human exasperation. "Go and prepare yourself for--"

"Sarek! Spock!" Amanda called, sounding more like a Terran farmwife than her alter ego as the poised and cultured Ambassador's wife, or the consort to the clan leader of the heir to Surak. "Dinner!"

Spock met his father's eyes, and took the brief hesitation in them as dismissal. As Spock fled out the office door, his relieved feet not pacing with full Vulcan stateliness since he was so grateful to make good his escape, he heard his father let out his own exasperated breath. It punctuated with a final note a universal lack of Vulcan control in this purportedly oh-so-Vulcan family.

_To be continued and completed in chapter 3_

_Review, review, review..._

13


	3. Chapter 3

**Biology**

by

**Pat Foley**

Chapter 3

Amanda had often stated that she considered the skill to be able to put aside disagreements long enough to share a meal pleasantly good training for all potential -- and real – diplomats. Spock, always a picky eater, lost all appetite under any tone of rancor. So, for that matter, did his mother. And under those auspices, mealtimes had been decreed by both his parents to be conflict free without exception.

Two subjects therefore forbidden at family table were Federation politics – at least the kind that fostered heated argument -- and reproof. This rule was so firmly established that by the time Sarek and Spock came back to the kitchen the moment in Sarek's office might not have happened. Sarek's Vulcan control was more than equal to it. And after a long childhood of being taken to task for one failing or another, Spock had developed a certain resilience. Whatever troubles might be plaguing their family before and after they sat down at table, they were put aside during it. Mealtimes were a thus relief for everyone. It was one place where no unpleasant words should be spoken.

In that respect, Amanda always came armed to the table with a host of innocuous chit-chat that would smooth over Vulcan reticence and get everyone talking, even after a spell of contention. This evening, she began with the notice of an upcoming concert they might choose to attend. A neutral enough topic, they discussed which night might best serve their respective schedules. She mentioned the lematya cubs she'd seen gamboling in the nearby foothills, visible from the gardens, prompting Sarek – with an eye more toward his wife than his son, to remind everyone of their danger. Amanda told some amusing stories from her teaching at the Academy. And then she casually led into a planned topic of hers.

" T'Vrien, that colleague from the Academy. She has a sehlat with four cubs that are almost ready for new homes. I was thinking perhaps we should look at them?"

"I have no objection to adding a sehlat to the household," Sarek said equably. Though Sarek had grieved greatly at I-Chiya's loss, he'd done it silently and with Vulcan control. For a time afterwards, he'd pushed Spock, almost insistently for a Vulcan, for them to add a new sehlat to the household. As a pet for Spock, of course. But if Sarek, who'd never known life on Vulcan without I-Chiya tagging at his heels, had found the loss of his pet more devastating than his son had, Spock's childish grief had been able to deal with it less. Spock stubbornly refused his father so repeatedly that Sarek had given up suggesting it. Sarek gave Amanda a pointed look, reminding her faulty human memory of that fact, "But Spock has expressed no wish for one since the loss of his pet."

"Yes. But that was a long time ago," Amanda returned. "He's much older now. And in every other respect, it's a better time for it. I don't think we'd even have to arrange for someone else to care for the sehlat when we have to travel. Spock is mature enough now to take care of himself rather than going away to school. And then, too, a sehlat would be company for him while we're gone. They'd take care of each other, so to speak."

Sarek straightened from what had been an appreciative consumption of his evening meal -- he had skipped lunch -- and gave his wife a sharp look. He was hungry enough that he'd been dividing his attention between appeasing his hunger and his wife's usual innocuous chatter and had therefore missed the implications of where she'd been leading. Amanda smiled back to that, sweetly, but with a nod reminiscent of Mammy after she told Scarlett she didn't notice Mr. Ashley 'asking for to marry her'. Given their family rules, it was vastly unfair of her to throw such a subject into play at the dinner table, when Sarek was at a disadvantage to reply as he might otherwise. But then, she'd been known to play dirty when Spock was involved. And at the very least it was a reminder to Sarek that she could and would.

Spock, meanwhile, got hold of himself while his parents were still engaged in their visual duel, and he managed to close his dropped jaw before his father noticed his stunned expression and chastised his lack of control. Even so he was still reeling. That his mother would counter his father's suggestion that he go away permanently to school with this new premise that he now need never go away at all, under the guise of him adopting a sehlat, was a diversionary ploy worthy of any negotiator. Though her audacity in doing so had shocked him. Into the breach of their shared stares, he threw in his oar on his mother's side. While the loss of I-Chiya was still a raw wound to a Vulcan with perfect recall, he'd gained enough maturity not to see his beloved pet in the face of a new one. And he could only wholeheartedly advocate for his mother's suggestion re schooling. He soundly disliked relocating teachers and studies and leaving his home every time his parents traveled. And while he would be lonely at home alone, a sehlat would be company for him. "I'd like to have a sehlat," he ventured into the breach.

Sarek shifted his gaze from staring down his wife. For a moment, he regarded his son with equal intensity, with a penetrating look that had melted many a deceptive negotiator. But Spock could meet his eyes without guile. Whatever his mother had been planning as a defensive move to Sarek's suggestion, he'd had no part of it. Accepting that, Sarek flicked a brow. "A sehlat you certainly may have. It is traditional for a clan heir."

"Well, if it's traditional…" Amanda said wryly, "that ends the discussion."

"Not entirely. We will debate the merits, or the lack of them, regarding your other conclusions at a later time." Sarek said, with a glance to her that said he would have more than a few words on the subject, and of her tactics. That having been said, he settled back, very nearly unruffled, to his meal. "But as to the first, I would not be adverse to a sehlat. It would be a most welcome companion on hikes," he added, warming to the subject. "Indeed, it will be quite pleasant to welcome another to the house. The Fortress has been too long without the benefit of their presence and their company."

"Oh, yes. I remember those benefits well. Hair, sand, dirt…" Amanda countered. She returned to her own meal, quite satisfied to have won the first round. "Not to exclude the particular aroma of a sehlat who's wallowed in one of the ornamental pools on a hot summer day." She wrinkled her nose in remembrance. "Or one who has dug up and eaten something particularly--"

"Sehlats are exceptionally clean and well behaved animals," Sarek stated, reaching for a second helping. He restrained himself from adding the addendum 'unlike some children', which would have tempted him had he not been at table.

"So speaks Vulcan loyalty over logic," Amanda said dryly, avoiding her husband's disapproving brow at that heretical teasing, acceptable when they were alone together, but inappropriate before their son. "Do you want a girl or a boy?" She asked Spock instead. "A girl might be easier to train."

"I can't imagine how you have come to such a fallacious supposition," Sarek came back. "In my experience, however limited, I have discovered that some girls are almost impossible to train."

Amanda drew up at that underhanded dig, and threw her husband a glare.

"Though with Vulcan persistence, I will endeavor to keep trying," Sarek continued with a flick of his brow.

Spock, who'd been about to reply to his mother, bit his lip on a revealing smile and ducked his head for good measure. He needn't have worried about his father's disapproving gaze, for his parent's were once again engaged solely with eachother.

"And I'm not sure I can handle another boy in the house," Amanda shot back to her husband. "Two of you are **quite** enough. It's past time for some parity of gender in this establishment."

"Why not both?" Spock interjected into the breach, having gotten control of his expression. When his parents both looked at him, as if both had forgotten he was in the room, he added, "Then they wouldn't be lonely for company while I'm in class."

"Two?" Amanda said, taken aback. "**Two** of those huge beasts trampling about the place? I was willing to have one, but--"

"But I think two is an excellent suggestion," Sarek said, with a certain evil relish at her discomfiture. When she gave him an appalled look, he added smoothly. "But I understand your quite natural concern."

"I should hope so," Amanda said, mollified.

"We would naturally have to choose two from different lines and litters entirely," Sarek continued. "Against the day when they will come to mate."

"To--?" she closed her mouth on the last word, astonished that Sarek would say such a thing at table. Even of sehlats.

"It is what girls and boys do," Sarek told his wife blandly.

"Do they?" she asked pointedly, with a trace of ulterior meaning in her tone.

"And then we will have cubs of our own to place," Sarek continued. With the purely Vulcan delight rampant in his warrior line for twisting the knife, he added "Four or even six in a litter is quite common." Sarek's delivery was a reminder of what generally happened to humans who took on Vulcans -- at least on their home turf.

"Oh, my." Struck by the thought of half a dozen sehlats – or more -- rampaging through the house, Amanda sat back in clear acknowledgement that while she had won a skirmish, Sarek had definitely taken this battle. Though she just as quickly rallied. "**You **will be doing the housebreaking then," Amanda told her husband. "Of these and all future litters."

"Sehlats are exceptionally intelligent," Sarek said loftily. "They are not dogs. There will be no trouble with housetraining, at all."

"And I'll remind you of **that** with the first puddle. Or lake, as the case may be. When I point out the cleaning supplies."

"**I **will be doing the housetraining," Spock said, into the argument. When both his parents looked at him, having once again nearly forgotten his presence, he added. "They will be my sehlats."

"Indeed they will be," Sarek said. "All of them. We'll review potential candidates tomorrow."

"And Spock will certainly need to be home, to look after all these sehlats," Amanda said pointedly, with a glance to her husband to let him know that she hadn't conceded the war. "Your father, as you know, is much too busy with his myriad responsibilities. And I, of course, have no abilities with training Vulcan animals." She gave her husband a meaningful look.

"Animals,' Sarek said, not liking that appellation and not quite sure that it didn't cover more than sehlats.

"If the shoe fits."

"What shoe?" Spock asked puzzled.

Sarek eyed his wife. "Your mother was saying--"

"Present company accepted, of course," Amanda interrupted him hurriedly. "So, Spock. You'll have to start thinking of names."

"Is there any dessert?" Sarek asked, having mopped up both dinner and argument.

After dinner, even Sarek helped in clearing away the dishes. But the truce among contentious issues that held sway during meals unraveled a bit, as they went through the brief chores of clearing the table and setting the kitchen to rights, even with the welcome prospect of new sehlat cubs in the house. Bringing his own dishes from the table, he watched the interplay between his parents. It always amazed him how his father never said anything about the waste of water his mother always used in such endeavors. But then, she was from a waterworld. To her, water was perhaps as ubiquitous an element as air, and something not really thought about. To a Vulcan, even to Spock, who'd grown up with her corrupting influence, it was a disconcerting thought. Even her plants used a prodigious amount of that element, as was evidenced when she handed him a spouted container and asked him to water those by the long kitchen windows. Tending them across the room, Spock looked up to see his parents talking quietly together, though their words were below his hearing. His father was reaching to put something on a shelf high over his mother's head. She was just closing the door of the sanitizer. Whatever he said to her must have affronted her, at least a little. She gave him a mock cuff and a jab of her elbow – and even though Spock himself was used to her giving him an occasional swat of reproof, it still shocked him inexpressibly to see his mother deliver physical blows to his father. Sarek caught her hands and then shifted his grip to hold her still preventing further such actions. She looked up at him and they shared one of those wordless looks that, together with their near embrace, made Spock quickly turn back to his watering chores, his face flushing. It was not his place to notice such things, yet, living among them, how could he not? He turned his attention resolutely to the crocuses were now just beginning to bud, With one careful finger, he wonderingly traced the hint of color in the alien bloom. Such a color was particularly unusual in a Vulcan plant, and he was eager to see the blooms. Behind him, he heard his mother laugh – how alien such a vocalization, in a Vulcan household, and did his mother not understand that? – and the indiscernible rumble of his father's reply. Looking back at his parents, he saw they were still engrossed with each other. He quickly finished his watering and slipped out of the room before they could remember he had still been there.

**XXX**

Spock well knew his bedtime, and once he became old enough to be considered responsible, rarely violated it. But now, disciplined sleep deserted him. No matter how he tried to banish the thoughts from his mind, he kept remembering his father's face when he had nearly spoken of the meaning of "an unspecified fever". And the scene in his office afterwards. The thought of sehlats was a mild distraction, but he couldn't help thinking of his mother. Though he didn't know quite what to think. Except that somehow, she ought to be told. It was wrong for her to be kept in ignorance. On the other hand, there was nothing he could do about it.

Finally, he gave up tossing and turning and went out the bedroom doors of his suite that opened on the rooftop gardens. Seeing Sarek up in the old sentry post that was his favorite meditation spot, Spock ducked behind a potted tree. Hugging the building so even starlight won't throw his shadow across the stones, he moved silently, taking care not to attract attention to his father's keen hearing, around to a terrace out of his father's line of sight and for the most part, sound. There, he flung himself down on the ground, staring up at the starfield. Out there was the Federation, more than half filled with humankind, like his mother. Like himself as well, though he rarely let himself think of that. And though Vulcans, like his father, considered themselves and their ways superior, the Terran dominated Federation was the major power in the galaxy, at least so far. No one could deny that they were numerous, motivated, smart after their own fashion, and capable people. He'd never really thought about it before, but now it was if he needed to think that way.

His mother was brilliant in her own way. Teaching at the VSA was no minor honor. Though among her colleagues there, her qualities were more average among geniuses than exceptional. Mere genius, and not, as was sometimes said of others, a genius' genius. He knew she won some Federation prizes, but her field was an obscure one, and not held in high honor by most Terrans or aliens, who would far rather be identified by their differences than for their shared characteristics. He also strongly suspected she was far more involved in his father's work than either of them routinely let on. While it wasn't necessary for him to know that, and he supposed there were very good reasons why he should not, still, right now, that reassurance seemed necessary to him.

Part of it was the heretical thought, that if he had to succeed his father, but was also rather too much like his mother, then if his mother was important to his father's work, he had more than half a chance to succeed at it -- if not from one parent's inheritance, then from the other. In fact, he had lately almost come to count on that. And if she were not? He hoped he was enough like his father to master those duties as he had most of the disciplines set for him so far. Most of them. Even if he seldom seemed to do so entirely to his father's standards.

The ever present worry over his father's planned future for him, and his ability to fit himself within it, meshed with his current discomfort over this latest discovery.

He was too young, yet, to understand that what really disturbed him was knowing something his mother did not. That wasn't all that unusual, really. He grew up, after all, inside of Vulcan culture. His mother lived very much on the fringes of it. Outside of the clan, a mere human, she could never really belong. There were scores of little things he knew that she didn't. When he was younger, he'd taken a child's delight at times in triumphing over her in knowing those minor things. Things that in general she cared nothing about, and if she had, she would have bothered to learn them. Even he knew that.

But this wasn't mere incidentals of culture, like the orders of clan precedence, or the details of the ceremony by which Surak's precepts were reaffirmed. This was biology, which rode above all culture. Which was inescapable. However much his mother might be outside the clan, not recognized by T'Pau, forever human, she was wife to a Vulcan. A bondmate, who, however much it was not his place to consider it, had served his father in numerous _Times_ and who had born him a child. She might not be Vulcan, but this was a fact of life. One of biology. And obscurely, he felt she was entitled to know of it.

And she had been disturbed. Upset by worry over this "unspecified fever". Even thinking it might be a danger to him. Outside of the clan, no Vulcan would speak of such a thing to her, even if she tried to ascertain it. His father had not told her. Worry was an unprofitable human emotion, but was it right to let her suffer from it when he had the facts to set her right?

He rolled over on the damp terrace, wondering if he dared speak the unspeakable to her. He had told his father he never would. But he had not thought it would so plague his conscience.

Though too immature to articulate it, there was a sense he was being made to grow up too soon, to know there were things he knew that his mother did not. Internally he railed against it, and yet by his father, was bound to silence. He didn't want to be in possession of a fact that his mother ought to know, yet had never been told. Not that he didn't, in some respects, sympathize with his father for not having told her. He didn't like knowing it either and wouldn't want to tell her. Yet the burden of knowing it when she did not weighed on him. He was, he felt obscurely, too young for such a burden.

"Spock. What are you doing out here?"

He turned, shocked that he'd been so lost in thought he hadn't heard her footsteps, even over the dew soaked sand. She was wearing a sweater against the evening chill, which here in the foothills, in the thin air, came quickly after sunset. And she was carrying a portable light.

Spock put his finger to his lips and wordlessly pointed to the spot behind the building where his father meditated. Not that Sarek could see them from this angle, but he could certainly hear them. In fact, unless he had turned his attention so inward as to be oblivious, the jig was probably up now. His mother had spoken in a normal tone of voice, clearly audible to his father's keen hearing. Disregarding his normal bedtime would not be a crime his father would much concern himself with, and would garner no more of his father's attention than perhaps a verbal reproof, if that. But neglecting his studies, or any number of the other sins Spock had been contemplating would certainly garner him some unpleasant attentions Spock didn't choose to seek.

"He's not there. I just went to tell him that he had a priority subspace call. That's why I'm out here. The question is, why are you?"

"I couldn't sleep."

"Excited about getting a sehlat?"

Spock gave her a wordless look.

Amanda sighed. "No. I didn't think so. I thought I had gotten you two past whatever had upset you both so this afternoon. But first your father comes out here to meditate, for far longer than he should have. And now I find you. What is it with both of you?"

Spock looked at her from under his lashes and looked away. "I was just looking at the stars."

She spared a casual glance for the magnificent starfield, that here in the foothills, far away from the city lights, stretched impressively from one horizon to the other in an immense tapestry. "Very pretty. It's a clear night. But the stars are as they always are. Why aren't you?"

Spock shook his head.

Amanda raised a brow and unexpectedly, sat down on the terrace beside him.

He drew a breath to say something – the ground was wet, it was cold, his father would not approve of this uncharacteristic late night tête-à-tête and therefore he could not, but Amanda spoke first.

"What did your father take you to task for, earlier this afternoon? Usually I can divine such things, but I confess this time, I'm clueless. And don't tell me that he didn't."

Spock shook his head, agreeing with her evaluation, even if he couldn't say so. Clueless she was indeed. "Don't ask me questions I can't answer."

"Oh, it's like that, is it?" She asked. With no particular rancor. Only a bit of exasperation. "Another Vulcan mystery."

Spock didn't say anything.

"Some deep dark secret, I gather."

"Not a secret," Spock contradicted. "Just…. something."

"That all Vulcans know, and for whatever reason, I don't." His mother didn't sound either surprised or upset about it. She didn't even sound particularly interested.

Spock didn't answer, but his shoulders dropped. He almost wished he had such a deplorable lack of curiosity, rather than a nature that at times seemed to perish from it. Curiosity, for him, was a particular plague. But, on the other hand, living on Vulcan his mother had probably long been surfeit about the arcane details of Vulcan culture, and not much interested in what to her was probably just one more. She wasn't curious about it at all, except that it was bothering him. He could feel her gaze upon him, and Vulcan controls aside, he wriggled a little.

"It must be awful, to have the weight of the world on your shoulders at twelve."

Spock raised betrayed eyes to her. It was one thing for her not to be interested, but quite another for him to be suffering on her behalf and have her… "You're laughing at me," he accused,

"Not at all. I think you probably do. Who more so than you, your father's son? And such a father." Amanda laughed lightly, ruefully again. "Particularly with such a clueless mother. You got, my son, a very raw deal."

That was a new way of looking at things, for Spock, who'd always been told how privileged he was to be the son of the heir to Surak's clan. He thought about that for a bit, though the notion was too Terran for him to accept. Instead he looked at his mother, who was gazing up at the starfield with appreciation. "How can you live here," he asked her, turning himself over to sit up straight, "and not be…competent?"

"Does it seem to you I'm so incompetent?" she asked, not sparing him a glance from her stargazing. "Look, I think that's Sol, over there."

"No, Mother," Spock said with ragged patience. "It is Regulus. Sol is in that direction, and entirely invisible at this season. "

"Hmm, Well, I might confess some incompetence. Only in certain things."

"Yes. That is quite evident."

She flicked a brow. "You may be right."

Spock couldn't help but disapprove. "And you don't care? You ought to care." His disapproval seemed to rankle in the space between them.

Amanda sighed. "Oh, Spock. If I let myself worry over everything I didn't know about Vulcans, I could never get through the day. Did you ever think, my son, how impossible it is for anyone, born into a completely different culture, on a different planet, to come to another world and another people, marry into them and be fully competent? I'm sorry that it shatters your ideals to have a mother so mortally flawed, but let's be realistic. I don't expect to be able to on Vulcan. And you're old enough now to understand that. You should appreciate it, given it's not even a human failing. Your father, for example, and for all his abilities, couldn't manage it on Terra. Though I suspect you don't believe that. The corollary being neither of us would expect **you** to be, even with my excellent example of things human. In spite of what your father sometimes says."

"But you live here on Vulcan." Spock looked away before he asked a heretical question. "This is your home, now, isn't it? Not Terra. How can you bear it? Being here. And yet **not** being of here."

Amanda sighed. "I'm not twelve, for one thing."

"I don't understand."

"You're coming to that adolescent stage when everything is so **extreme**. I don't know why I didn't think that wouldn't be equally true for Vulcan adolescents."

"I'm not," Spock denied.

Amanda bit her lip on a smile. "And, for another, I don't have to answer to your father when I don't understand everything."

Spock gave her a truculent look from under his lashes and then dared to make a very inappropriate comment, by Vulcan standards. Only because his mother was human, and overlooked such transgressions did he dare it. "It seems to me that at least sometimes, you do."

"Only when I choose to."

Spock shook his head "I don't believe that. Father is…" he hesitated.

"Oh, go ahead and say it. I give you leave to speak as candidly as you like."

Spock eyed her warily. "Only that Father is father. Even when he is your bondmate "

"He can be a little…extreme. But I love your father regardless. Spock, one of the things I hope you'll someday learn about love is that you come to excuse the other's faults. Particularly those he can't help."

"Does he excuse yours?"

"Well, as you say, your Father is Vulcan," Amanda said lightly. "Some he certainly does. As for the others – and for yours, that he takes you to task for – remember love is a human emotion that I don't think either you or your father has learned that very well. Not a credit to me, given I've had you both under my wing all this time. And Vulcan's don't really love quite in a human fashion either. Though I think, with a little work, and my excellent example, you might manage it at last. At least I hope you will, eventually."

Spock shook his head at this folly. "I wonder that you expect that of him," Daring the license she'd granted, he ventured, "You do know you behave disgracefully toward him?"

"Do I?" Amanda gave him a look. "Really? I thought I behave reasonably respectfully. At least, given I'm a human. I'm not a Vulcan wife. "

"No, you don't. Not at all."

She spared him a glance. "Is there some Vulcan comportment class you've attended that I've missed? Where do you get your examples? I am the only mother you've got, so far as I know."

"It is **so** obvious."

Amanda laughed at his superior, condescending tone. "You are becoming such a teenager. But perhaps you're right. Still, I do try."

"Not very hard. No wonder he doesn't-- " Spock closed his mouth on the forbidden topic, and approached another tangentially. "I wonder that he doesn't mention something to you about it."

"I **am** human."

"But he is **Vulcan**. **We** are Vulcan," Spock reiterated, a little desperately.

"You perhaps. Not me."

"Mother," Spock dared to ask, "Would it not have been more logical to marry a human?"

"Oh. I see where all this is coming from. You and your father discussed some deep, dark Vulcan secret between you this afternoon. One that is tearing you in two. And if only I'd had the good sense to marry a human, this cup would have passed from your adolescent shoulders."

He would have protested, but it came to him, that in spite of her undisciplined phrasing, she had caught his feelings, heretical though they were. He chose to say nothing, effectively confirming them.

"It would have been easier, had I not married your father. But it wouldn't have been right. Particularly when I look at you." She sighed as he lowered his head. "Well, I know that probably doesn't help. But if you want, I'll tell you a deep dark **human** secret, to go along side your Vulcan one. Balance out that grief."

Spock wasn't sure he wanted any more adult burdens on his shoulders but he was too curious not to look a question. Amanda leaned her head down and whispered into one minute pointed ear. "Logic isn't everything."

Spock reared back in disappointment and disapproval. "That's no secret. Particularly for humans."

"Then I'll tell you something that isn't a secret, but that you need to hear. Vulcan isn't the whole universe."

"I **know** that."

"From **your** behavior, I could hardly tell."

"For now, it's my whole universe. And it ought to be yours."

Amanda turned at that, curious enough to look at him. "Do you really believe that?"

He didn't. But in a way, he did.

Amanda shook her head. "That's a deplorable thought. I know part of this is adolescent angst, and the peculiar conservativism teenagers develop before you all go into that rebellious stage –"

"I'm not in a **stage**," Spock said with derision.

"But I'm beginning to think we're doing you a disservice not to take you with us on trips. I know T'Pau isn't thrilled about having all her heirs off planet together, but on the less contentious trips we probably ought to manage it. In spite of your father's concerns about security. And schooling."

"I don't want to go on those trips."

"Vulcan be your whole universe? How can that be? Just look at today, and think of all the Terran elements that blended with the Vulcan background to merge together in your universe. Are you telling me you aren't richer, and better for that blending?"

"That doesn't mean it's correct to live that way. Particularly for Vulcans."

"Being a little of both, you need to find some sort of happy compromise between your father's teachings and my own. Without compromising your duties. Your father has managed it, you know. In marrying me. So it's just as possible for you."

"But I'm not talking about me."

Amanda took her eyes from the starfield. "You're not?"

Spock shook his head.

She blinked in astonishment. "Do you mean, that you've been sitting out here in the dark, torn in two, not because of some perceived failing on your part that your father took you to task for, but because of me?"

Spock looked at her mutely.

"Because of **me**?" she asked again, incredulously. "What **did** your father say to you?"

When he didn't answer, that was answer enough for her. She took a deep breath, shaking her head, and got to her feet. "Heavens. I think it's long past time for you to go into bed."

Spock rose as well, dusting off his hands the inevitable gritty sand that permeated even the Terrace gardens.

Amanda stood looking down at him. "Spock, I am a grown woman. And your mother. You don't need to concern yourself with me. And," she added, phrasing her words so even a Vulcan adolescent could understand them, "I forbid it. Is that good enough for you?"

Spock nodded.

Amanda shook her head. "Good night."

Spock started to trudge off and then shifted back, anxiously. "You won't tell him?"

"You haven't told **me** anything."

"That doesn't matter. He would be very displeased with me."

"Oh, go to bed you silly child. I won't tell him we talked – about nothing, as the case may be. So long as you remember what I just told you to do."

Spock looked at her closely, and then, his shoulders dropping as if he'd been relieved of at least one burden, went off to bed.

**XXX**

When Sarek didn't show up in their suite, even long after he should have finished his call, she went in search of him, concerned it was some Federation problem requiring them to immediately pack up and hare off on some new mission. When she entered her husband's office though, she was could see, displayed on his computer screen a splay of Vulcan text, and a picture of a pair of sehlats romping across the desert sand.

"Sehlat shopping already?" She picked up the printed out pages of pictures and pedigrees, and scanned through them.

"Some research is required."

."They look awfully big," Amanda said doubtfully.

"I was under the impression you were fond of I-Chiya."

"Of course I was." She put the pages down and faced him. "I like dogs as well as any woman. And every boy needs one. Regardless of their age," she added, giving her husband a level look.

"Sehlats are not--"

"And even cats, in a pinch. In spite of the perpetual nastiness of Vulcan ones. I just wish they didn't have to be so big. But you still owe me, you know. You wouldn't have thought to ask him if he'd gotten over it."

"Such emotional conditions are not inherent to Vulcans."

"You were just never five and having lost a beloved pet. I seem to recall even at seventy-five you took it pretty hard."

"Perhaps," Sarek said, a rare concession for him.

"So," Amanda concluded, "you owe me."

"Indeed? Before I concede any indebtedness, I'd like to know what compensation you require."

She toyed with a statue on his credenza, cut from mountain rock, of a lematya outstretched in full attack mode. "I'd like to know what you took Spock to task for, this afternoon. Usually, I can figure you out, but this time--"

Sarek turned away, under the guise of closing down his computer. "It's not something of concern to humans."

"Excuse me?" She shifted to face him. "I'm not just any human, you know. I'm your wife. And the only mother that boy has got. I'm entitled to know."

Sarek looked up from sliding his sehlat research into a folder and taking the statue from her hands, replaced it to its exact spot. "Some things are appropriate for Vulcan knowledge alone."

"I already know the **worst** secret," she said. "At least from a Vulcan viewpoint. And I've survived that knowledge."

"Survival," Sarek said dryly, putting the folder into his desk. "is the subject at hand."

Amanda crossed her arms. "When you go all dramatic, I start to worry."

"There is no need. The subject is closed." Sarek rose from his desk. "It's late. Let us retire."

"Not so fast. It's not closed for me, since I was never in on it when it was opened. I'd understand if I were Vulcan, wouldn't I?"

"Yes." Rising, he reached out and touched her face. "But that doesn't mean you need know it now." He looked down at her, still cradling her cheek. "There are times, my wife, when I wish you were not human."

She stared at him a moment, then looking hurt, broke away, taking a few steps aside. "Are you trying to be cruel?"

"Rather the reverse. Because if you were not human, you would not have emotional reactions. Or at least not be distressed by them."

"Are my emotions such horrid things?" She looked at him briefly. "There are times, I remind you, when you don't seem to mind them much. When they serve you very well."

"It is the times when they don't serve you well that I regret."

"What do you mean?"

"I mind them very much when they concern you."

"It's **your** behavior that is upsetting me. Leave my emotions out of your consideration."

"I can't. I would keep you safe, even from yourself."

She looked up at him. "You and your son both share that mistaken assumption."

"What do you mean?" Sarek asked.

"Just that your son is sometimes too much like you. But not even you can manage to save me from myself. I am what I am, Sarek. And if what you say is part of Vulcan life, it can't be changed. And if it will bother me a little, well, then it will have to. It's too late for wishing I'm not involved. Or to try to hide the facts from me."

"I don't regret that you are human. I regret that, because you **are** human, you can be distressed."

"But aren't you distressed now? Isn't Spock? Why should I be so spared?"

"We are Vulcan. If there are flaws in our emotional control, they are ours to address."

"I wonder that you think humans are any more overset by emotional considerations, just because, at times, we express them. Or that Vulcans are any less, from not doing so. It seems to me very much the opposite. Can't you see the illogic of what you are doing?"

Sarek turned to her, stung by that accusation. The abruptness of his movement spoke that she had hit a nerve, a flaw in his control. Perhaps a trace of guilt. The brief uncontrolled motion and the fierceness of his gaze would have given a Vulcan pause, knowing the strong emotions it bore witness to, even if the reason for those emotions were kept hidden. Being human, and naïve in that respect, Amanda met his gaze undaunted by the evidence of a passion that would have warned any Vulcan to retreat. "Amanda--"

"You can't keep me safe, Sarek."

"I can very well try." He had regained control of himself. His voice was cool, but underlain with the fierce determination that characterized a Vulcan. "And I will. In that, you have no choice."

Amanda shook her head, as much in exasperation as negation. "At what cost? Didn't Vulcans long ago determine that safety wasn't worth any price?"

"In theory. In practice, with bondmates, it can be otherwise."

"That, my Vulcan husband, **is** emotion."

"No. It is biology."

Amanda sighed. She had some understanding of how inviolate biology could be for Vulcans. It was the only thing that they allowed to override logic. It was the only thing that could. "Your biology. Not mine. Don't you understand? It's your flaw, not mine that's the issue here. And you don't need to keep me safe from it!"

"It is what I must keep you safe from."

"Why? Because I'll be shocked? Sarek, I'm human. Sex is just sex."

"Not always, with Vulcans."

"I don't understand you. What aren't you telling me?" When he didn't answer, she shook her head in frustration. "Sarek, I'm your wife. I've borne you a child. I've been through Pon Far, more than once. What are you so afraid of? And whatever it is, can't you understand that I'm not? And that I can understand, if you give me half a chance."

"Humans have a saying. Ignorance is bliss. Where I can, I would rather have you blissful, than knowledgeable." He sighed, just a little, looking down at her. "In fact, in some respects, it is rather…charming."

Amanda blew out a breath in exasperation. "Oh, what sheer chauvinistic, ethnocentric nonsense. I can put up with your male dominating follies. I can put up with Vulcan superiority. I can even put up with your crazy, convoluted customs about your biology. But when you combine them together against me, I could throttle you. Vulcans ought to make ignorance, or at least avoidance, their watchword and Holy Grail. You are being so ridiculous. Can't you see that trying to shield me – and Spock, too, for that matter – is only hurting us?"

"I'm not shielding Spock. I'm only holding him to the standards necessary for his acceptance in Vulcan society."

"We've had that argument before. In trying to make sure he had every opportunity you had, aren't you ignoring the real issue of who he is?"

"Who he must learn to be is more the issue."

"You want to spare him – and yourself, I suspect, but mostly him – the hurt he might encounter if he wasn't acknowledged as your oh-so Vulcan son. No matter what it takes – or how it hurts him or me otherwise?

Sarek rounded on her. "You can't tell me you haven't regretted and agonized – cried bitter tears – over every hurt or slight – however true or imagined – you thought that child has faced. Don't try to deny it. I have **seen** you do so."

"Of course, I have. I'm his mother. I'm human. Sarek, that's **normal**, for humans But I've **never** tried to keep him in a box to spare his feelings. There's the difference between us. And I certainly don't want you do it to spare mine!"

"I am not human. And I will do what I must."

"I want you to stop it!"

"I can not."

She drew a ragged breath, and stared at him for a long time. "You can't, can you? I mean, you really, really can't."

Sarek was silent for a long moment. Then he said, almost reluctantly, "It is, as you say, normal. If not for all Vulcans, than for me. I am what I am, Amanda. Some things are outside the realm of even Vulcan controls."

"Biology," Amanda said. And choked out half a laugh. "Biology."

"You're my wife." Sarek said it, quite seriously as if that were explanation enough. Perhaps it was, for him.

"Does Spock know? Does he understand this? Why you are, sometimes, the way you are?"

"I don't know."

"You mean, you're not sure if he is Vulcan enough?"

"If he has inherited traits that are present in our line, if not at full force in every individual. If his bond with T'Pring becomes strong enough…. Then some day, he will." Sarek hesitated, then said. "But it might be far better, if he is not. And he does not."

Amanda wondered, perhaps heretically, if that's why Sarek chose TPring for their son. She didn't seem to her the type to inspire such all encompassing Vulcan devotion, however misapplied it could be at times. "Except he'll never have any chance of understanding you otherwise. Will he?"

"It's not important that he understand me. Again, in regard to this, it might be better if he did not."

"I don't agree. "I think that's foolish, if not outright dangerous. And I'm sure he wouldn't agree."

"He is a child. What is important is that his mother understands me."

"Aren't you trying to deny something in your son that is a part of you, more inherent to his nature than any human traits he might have inherited from me?"

"I'm trying to **help** him. And you. Not all of Vulcan nature is estimable."

"I think you're wrong."

"Given how little you know of the true nature of Vulcans, you are no judge. What you need to do, is understand and accept my judgment."

Amanda bit her lip, and looked away. "And yet, you aren't telling me enough to understand. You never do. So much of Vulcan nature, and Vulcan culture, is still secret from me."

"I am telling you that it is your duty to accept, regardless of the extent of your comprehension."

"Duty is not the watchword for me that it is for you."

Sarek reached out, and took her hand. "I think you sell yourself rather short in that respect."

She looked down at his hand on hers. "I still think you're wrong. And someday, I think, you'll come to understand what I mean. But, for the present," she sighed. "What I can't understand, or don't know, you're then asking me to accept on faith. And faith can sometimes be worn very thin on these issues. In this marriage, it is getting quite a workout."

"On logic," Sarek countered gently. "Accepting that I have good logical reasons."

"That you won't share, so that doesn't work for me. Which leaves me only with love. And whether you deserve it or not, I do love you."

"Love is immaterial."

She gave him a look. Neither her husband nor her son had ever told her they loved her, not in so many English words. But nor did they generally flat out deny their caring in other ones. When Sarek was that blunt, he was being so for a specific reason. "I know what that's code for."

"Biology, as you well know, cannot be thwarted."

"If I didn't know you, and love you and trust you as much as I do, I suspect you, my dear husband, of using that excuse to always get your way."

Sarek glanced at her. "What a shocking accusation. Besides being entirely untrue, it would be immoral to so devious."

"It is very convenient. It serves you so well, but like faith, for me at times, that excuse wears pretty thin. Vulcans may rear back in horror and never confront an issue just because it is related to biology. Humans aren't so reverent. You avoid, and evade and deny, and control. Wouldn't it be better to just confront and accept your own nature?"

"I do accept it, And on some issues, there is nothing I can do."

"Oh, that's no excuse!"

"It is the truth."

"It's a cop out," she said bitterly.

"Amanda--"

"You really aren't going to tell me what you and Spock were upset about this afternoon?"

"I am not."

"You know that someday, I will find out," she warned.

"I sincerely hope that you will not. And that it won't be through my doing that you do."

"Never the less, I will."

"And if I command you not to attempt such?"

"You're my husband. Not my liege lord."

"I am both."

"I didn't take any vows to obey."

"Honor, would do."

Amanda sighed in frustration. "Honor, indeed. You are so lucky that I love you so much to put up with this Vulcan cloak and dagger nonsense about basic facts I should be cognizant of – and the roles you expect me to play."

He raised a brow. "Am I?"

"You are."

"I must take that, as you say, on faith."

"No, Sarek. You still don't get it. You have to take it on love. It's the only thing that works between us, when we come to these issues. Whether you acknowledge it or not. You do understand that, don't you?"

Sarek said nothing.

Amanda sighed in frustration and turned to look out the long windows that overhung the formal Vulcan gardens. Most of the plants were fierce desert bred creatures, long-lived and tenacious, even under the most adverse conditions. Now gardeners had trained then into careful disciplined patterns. No wonder Sarek's office overlooked that exemplary vista, object lesson that it was. But however appropriate, she couldn't appreciate the inherent lesson. "Either I am a lousy teacher, or you, my husband, are a very poor student."

Sarek came up behind her. "Perhaps, like Vulcan biology being unique to Vulcans, human love is something that cannot be taught."

She looked back over her shoulder at him, a sight more pleasant than the suddenly unlovely gardens. "You don't mind if I go on trying, do you?"

For the first time since she entered his office, Sarek unbent enough to soften his expression into the half smile even Vulcans allowed. "I'll endeavor to tolerate the attempt."

"It wouldn't kill you, you know, to tell me that you love me."

"For a Vulcan," Sarek said, his teasing underlain, like the gardens, with complete seriousness, "it very well might."

"Oh, you," Amanda said. "You're right. It's useless for us even to try to discuss this subject. Let's just go to bed. There, at least," she gave him an exasperated look, "we manage to communicate reasonably well."

"Biology," Sarek said, with a flick of a brow and a flicking off of the lights, "does have some common expressions, even between our two species." He took his wife's hand, to guide her in the dark.

"For what seems like the hundredth time, my dear husband," she said into the dark, having the last word, at least for a time, "it's love."

**XXX**

In the end, her colleague's cubs were deemed insufficiently grand. Sarek and Spock spent several evenings in Sarek's study researching pedigrees before deciding on two litters with a lineage suitably illustrious to grace the former house of Surak, where even sehlats had to have the bluest of green blood.

"I wonder that you let **me** live here," Amanda said, eyeing the pedigree. "I feel more like an imposter than ever."

"Present company accepted," Sarek returned, getting the last word on that subject, even if a few days late.

Spock choked down an inadvertent laugh.

Nor could Amanda give him the clout he deserved, given it would shock her conservative son. The life of a human in a Vulcan household **was** a continual trial. On the other hand, she had walked into that one. And however Vulcans have tried to contain their warrior nature, when you set yourself up so obligingly, as well as having previously been guilty of some dirty shots, it take a very disciplined Vulcan not to resist the temptation not to reply in kind, even when you least expect it.

"You were saving that," she accused, trying not to be amused.

"I can't imagine what you mean," Sarek replied.

Being no Vulcan, she couldn't resist a little escalation in turn.

"You must always remember, Spock," she said, holding her husband's eye, "to follow your father's excellent examples. In all his many ways."

Sarek's eyes narrowed in return.

"I always do," Spock replied, causing both of his parents to do a double take, not sure if this time the son had gotten the last word. But this time, Spock's expression was controlled – and innocent – enough to conceal any private mischief he'd intended.

Amanda couldn't quite help thinking that was one victory for her side.

"Go prepare to leave, Spock" Sarek said, giving his son a speculative glance. "We have sehlats to review."

Spock trailed a glance from one parent to the next, "I always get sent--"

"Go. Now." Sarek waited until his son was well out of even Vulcan earshot. "He really ought to go away to school."

"You lost that battle," Amanda said, not without some satisfaction. She didn't win many of them when her son's Vulcan education was concerned. "Anyway, who was it who indulged in a little Vulcan humor? At his human wife's expense, I remind you? "

"My human wife has a credit balance in that respect, that occasionally demands repayment."

"Anyway, even **you're** not sure if Spock was just teasing you in turn."

"Hmmm. You weren't either?"

Amanda shook her head. "Not this time."

"He really **ought** to go to school."

"Look on the bright side, Sarek. If even you're not sure if he's teasing you, he **is** mastering control of **something**."

Sarek stared at her, astounded. "How can you live on Vulcan for so long, and still be so completely human?"

"I get that a lot," Amanda agreed. "Look, you'd better get going. He's probably out there having half dismantled the aircar -- at least mentally. And occasionally his fingers get tempted enough to follow. At least riding herd on a couple of sehlat cubs will keep him busy for a while."

"I remind you again that sehlats are not the dogs you seem to regard them as," Sarek said, as he held open the door to the garden court for her. "They are highly intelligent, eminently trainable, and will be perfect examples of Vulcan rectitude."

"I've heard that before in regard to other things Vulcan," she said, as they walked out to the hanger and came up to where Spock had restrained himself to only opening the aircar, and running through the preflight check. He was legitimately manhandling two wire crates into the cargo area as they walked up. "And the result has been known to dismantle half the house."

Spock might have missed the earlier part of the discussion, but he knew full well the latter was in reference to him. He tried to look offended, even as he tried not to show any expression at all. She had to hide her own amusement as the conflict warred across his face.

"So while you two are choosing the perfect sehlats, I'll spend the afternoon cub-proofing. Though with sehlats weighing upwards of half a ton, that is probably a futile endeavor.".

"You can attend," Sarek offered.

"No," she declined. "I am no judge of sehlats, as you know." A day spent debating the subtle and arcane points of sehlat conformation in the Vulcan heat over a procession of cubs that all would probably look pretty much alike to her didn't much appeal. She'd appreciate them – as it were – soon enough in her shaded gardens. And it was a good opportunity for her husband and son to engage in a little father/son bonding away from her human influence. So she waved them off, amused to see that under that veneer of self-control both her Vulcans were probably as excited as pre-Kahs Wahn kids.

When the cubs finally arrived, she was as excited as her Vulcans had pretended not to be, in spite of her misgivings about two eight hundred pound creatures thundering around the house, not to mention future offspring. But she had never seen the pint sized cub version of baby sehlats. "Oh," Amanda said, coming forward as Spock came in, staggering a little under the considerable heft and size of even a young cub. "They're so adora--"

Seeing this foreign smelling creature, the baby sehlat gave a woof and a growl and struggling out of Spock's arms, made as if for her, Spock in hot if belated pursuit. He grabbed the cub and went down with an oomph as the wind was knocked out of him, the cub went down under him with a squeal. Both slid across the stones of the garden court under the sheer force of momentum to land nearly at her feet, she stepping aside at the last minute to be spared being bowled over herself.

"able," she finished, looking down dubiously at them.

"What the--" Sarek came in behind Spock, arms laden with the female cub.

"I was saving her from harm," Spock said, shaking his head dazedly. "He was trying to attack."

"Most commendable, I'm sure," Sarek said, putting the smaller girl cub in Amanda's arms and lifting both son and boy cub, which was now assiduously scouring Amanda's ankles, by the respective scruffs of their necks.

"What a beauty," Amanda settled down on the ground to get better acquainted with her charge. "What's your name?"

"The boy is I-Charyn," Spock said, having successfully corralled his cub and trying not to be bowled over by him.

"And the girl?"

"We thought we'd let you name her," Sarek suggested. "In deference to equity."

"Oh," Amanda looked up at her husband from where she'd buried her face in the soft fur, recognizing the peace offering being extended. "That's sweet." She drew back a little, to look the sehlat in the face. "What shall we call you, you beautiful creature?" she asked. "What's your name?"

"Mother, she can't speak," Spock said patiently. "She is too young even to have developed the empathic abilities for which sehlats are prized."

"You'd be surprised what she can say," Amanda said, carding her own fingers through the fur. "All the names I would think of would probably be inappropriate for her illustrious pedigree. Doesn't she need to have a Vulcan name?"

"She has already, a lineage identification number and a name combining her breeding line and the names of both her sire and dam," Sarek let himself down on the court stones next to his wife and reached over to pet the cub as well. "The name in question now is essentially a call name. Are you thinking of something Terran?"

Amanda looked down at the sehlat and then over at her son, whose head was bent over the boy cub. "No," she said, with acknowledgement, meeting her husband's eyes. "They're Vulcan after all. We'll give her a Vulcan name."

His hand strayed from petting the sehlat cub and under the covering of sehlat fur, covered her own.

The concert was that evening. After a day spent romping in the garden court, the young sehlats were ready for a rest. Concerned about the lematya cubs in the area – for the little ones did get into the gardens – and that his cubs were not sensible enough to avoid an altercation, Spock insisted they shut them in the kitchen. Both Spock and Sarek for good measure, gave them a firm command to behave themselves. The cubs wagged their stubs of tails – "see, they are like dogs," Amanda commented – and collapsed obligingly on the pallets provided.

The concert was lovely, though Amanda was unimpressed with the lyrist. "You play better," she told her husband.

"Not at all," Sarek demurred, though he shared that opinion privately.

"He does," Spock agreed with his mother. "We're working on that composition in my lessons. And even mother must have heard the lyrist flub the bridge into the third movement, which Father plays perfectly" he hummed it for their benefit.

"We don't need a second concert, Spock," Sarek said.

"And even _I_ rarely mis-string it."

"Your lessons are coming along well enough," Sarek acknowledged.

"It must be a hereditary trait," Amanda commented, amused.

"Musical ability generally is," her husband agreed.

"I meant the overweening pride," she teased.

Both Vulcans shared an offended look.

After any time spent in the torrid desert city of Shikahr, built for its underground oasis, Amanda was always happy to come home to her home in the mountain foothills. The old Fortress was a bit chilly by Vulcan standards, but it suited Amanda, and she was grateful for its situation, long ago meant to defend the one accessible pass through the mountains that gave access to the city and its water supply. The breeze sweeping down from the mountains after sunset was particularly nippy, and while Sarek and Spock lifted their heads appreciatively, like hunting dogs – "Do you scent the le-mayta?" Sarek asked Spock, who nodded, she hurried out of the wind. She was thus the first to enter the kitchen, though she didn't get very far inside. Her exclamation was not very loud, but remembering how I-Charyn had mistaken her for an odd smelling predator before, it brought Sarek and Spock on the run. Amanda hadn't moved from the doorway, and Sarek stopped so abruptly he had to catch hold of her to prevent both of them from going down in a tumble from his momentum. All three of them thus stood framed in the doorway.

The sehlats had woken up quite rejuvenated from their naps, and let it not be said that curiosity was a trait held by only the dominant species on Vulcan. They'd apparently started with a bowl of fruit that had been knocked off the table, and the contents rolled around like balls and then partially chewed. Most of the cushions from the kitchen chairs, hand made by Amanda, had been tossed around and torn. They'd then moved on to investigate further. Every cabinet had been opened, by paw or sehlat fang, and the floor was littered with the torn open and trampled remains of boxes of cereal, crackers, cookies, dried beans, nuts, seeds and flours. They had even gotten to an expensive and imported box of chocolate cake mix that Amanda had been saving for some special occasion. Apparently liking the scent of chocolate, they had rolled in it, throwing themselves down with abandon, if the clouds of chocolate dust that had been throw up ceiling high was any evidence. Then they had apparently decided to bathe in the water bowls that had been left for them, for the bowls were overturned and there was evidence of scratches where they'd dug at the floor around them. Romping around, refreshed from their baths, they'd either mistaken the long floor to ceiling windows as a portal to the garden outside, or in chasing each other had just slid on the flour slick floor and crashed into them that way. But the windows had dual flour portraits of sehlat cubs. And in rebounding from the windows, they'd knocked over the stands holding Amanda's flowering plants. The plants had been torn up, and the leaves, flowers, loamy soil and water from the plants had run into the water from the sehlat bowls and the contents of the cabinets to create a soupy mess. In the center of this stood two chocolate and soil frosted sehlat cubs, with a liberal added coating of dried beans, rice and macaroni. The bigger cub had a garland of a rare red honeysuckle vine Amanda had been rooting looped around his neck. Dangling from one of the girl cub's fangs was the roots and bulb of a crocus, and from the bulb the tiny petals had finally opened.

It was understandable that the spot of cheerful lilac stood out against the muddy wash of the kitchen, and the newly dark-dyed sehlats in a contrast particularly sharp for Vulcan retinas. And the obsessive and sometimes single-minded vision of a Vulcan to a pet interest was also well documented in Surak's line. Yet both Vulcan and human parents had to be commended for not committing infanticide when, as they stood still immobile in their shock, their son stepped forward, lifted the limp blossom from the sehlat's fang and held it up in evidence.

"Look Mother! Your crocuses have bloomed!"

_Fini! Finally -- this story was three times as long as I'd wanted it to be._

_Last chance to review…_

**Biology**

**By**

**Pat Foley**

**Holography, series 0**

**April 2008**

**At Brookwood**

16


End file.
